Where they become the exhibits…and how no one knows, no one understands: they just proceed with their mingling, they talk themselves on, jaw and thrust tongues, as bottles pour out into glasses that clink; ladies in the powder room, which is a lavishly appointed facility, staffed with dour, whispery immigrant attendants hired away from area hotels especially for this evening and now everafter, they offer hot and moist towelettes, perfumes and mints…they the women all pause their ministrations a moment at the sudden silence — then resume, din, mingling mingle, while their husbands they wait outside, glance at their watches, wait, talk talk, get dragged away, by associates, by acquaintances, business partners, brothers-inlaw, and by strangers, there’s a mensch I’d like you to meet…into discussions, discursions, digressions importuned upon deviant involutions of tangents. Eden’s gates have shut, have locked, keeping them here, fallen within, frozen in time, frozen as time. To live here, to become exhibits themselves, as they’re already exhibits of themselves, and then for themselves, too, exhibited exhibitionists, say: mulling the mulledover forever, ruminating until the food and drink run dry, they’re examining, framing, and posing, appraising the pagelike walls with thumb and with tongue…scratching with questionmarked fingers their heads, then at others’ detailoriented they’re scrutinizing to ever, patronizing patrons, both viewers, the viewed, the subject and its object all talked, compared, contrasted, parsed a rolled tongue into one, and then swallowed: eventually finding their ways out into the far halls, Tonguesearching at first, Tongueforgetting too soon, deep into the shadowy spaces, the attic’s dim ducts and then the underground stairwells of emergency access…the furthest recesses of memory’s muse; the evening running forever late, the world, too, damned, without exit.
And as everything is nested in everything, and That, too, in everything, unto when or wherever you just get tired, decide to call it a day and it was and it was good…or, maybe Gnosticwise, that heresy older than heresy, older even than the One True God against which or Whom one would rail — holding that the ruler of this world is only the ruled of a greater world, then that the ruler of that world is in turn only the ruled of an even greater world, and then yaddaing blah imploding on down through the core of the cosmos, if you’re interested, threehundred and sixtyfive times, which, FYI, was how many days they’d had in their old years, way back when: O to have lived before the Sixthousands…a dayschool group yawning, fidgeting amid a handful of misanthropic sketchers in ash, in ashes and uniformed sackcloth themselves (as thinly sketched as they are here, it’s nothing compared to how blank their own pages), annoyed and trying to appear as such, mourning recess, feeling sorry — then, there’s also a Museum of Museums, the mensch says, gasping for air, and here there’s all of one exhibit, one piece…this spindly docent he folds himself up in his map of the premises, distractedly forces it around himself, over his eyes, around his ears, nose, and mouth until the urge obligingly rips a hole for his voice, high and yet groucho, at the southernmost tongue of the southernmost state, which is this one.
It’s named where it is, he says, what it is, holding the torn shreds in his old, unsure hands — it’s the world!
Unimpressed, the group from the dayschool leans up against the walls, futzes with the peel of the plaster.
But you’ve come for the Inhibition, no?
Follow me, he says with a tremor, singlefile, this way…
This here is PopPop’s unit towered down where the sun don’t shine, and this particular docent (an ancient stoop of a Miami native, a retiree, slippered, rippedarmchair historian who wouldn’t be made assistant to the least curator despite his appeals and the expertise of his simper), he guided on Mondays & Thursdays, then mensched the Information Desk on Fridays until sundown, at which position he’d give out only information about the desk: this is wood, he’d say, rap his knuckles atop, about two centuries old by the best guesstimate, mine…the tree, it was sawed down, wood planed, legs nailed into place, then all of it varnished; it was owned by a resident of this tower who died with the Rest, shipped Over Here from the Old World, Over There roundabout last millennium, midcentury or so before, though who knows for sure…one can’t accurately tell the extent of its use due to frequent restaining: a light red, I’d say, at least it once was or should be, a pity that now all colors come hard to me; it’s the old eyes, and the weather — but seriously (refers to his notes): handbrushed cherry almost oxblood’s its name with a nice fluted edge, two drawers and two leaves for extension, seats eight, I’m telling you, you couldn’t do better…
